emails shwemails

For the last 6 or so months, I’ve been helping my dad with his real estate biz, and although I enjoy maintaining the site, gaining leads & crushing the competition in the SERP wars (ok so maybe i haven’t truly crushed each and every one of them, but my traffic is on a high I might consider offering paid ads!), it’s also a bit disheartening for me and mi papa when leads refuse to follow basic email etiquette, and that is:

to reply when information is provided to you – no matter if the reply is positive or not.

It astounds me that so many people out there still refuse to practice basic human decency and proper manners when it comes to email. Are you too busy to even reply? Then why inquire in the first place? Or if you’re not really interested, please spare us the work and let us focus on the really serious buyers, eh?

In fact, some who’ve inquired even refuse to give out their phone numbers (when we’ve put up OUR own landline/mobile/email contact information) simply because it’s private information.. uh okay should I be suspicious of you or something?

This frustrates me to no end…I’m even tempted to put a sign on the site that says if you can’t trust us with your information, then beat it! I know trust is an important factor in selling, but let’s reverse the situation…why should we trust you if you can’t trust us? Shouldn’t that be a 2 way street?  Most real estate companies do profiling first on their clients before they entertain them so what we do shouldn’t come as a shock or feel invasive to them.

But I digress, when my issue here are people who ignore our followups. Is it so hard to say, sorry we’re not interested versus ignoring a human being who worked themselves out to give you the information you need? Arg. I’m not demanding you reply in an hour or two – we have realistic email expectations after all. We expect though, a reply – maximum 3 days after we’ve sent out the email (see? is that so bad?).

So from now on, I won’t be nice. Not too nice anyway, because I’m sure there are people out there who are professional enough to reply – those are the people who give me hope and teach me to assume the good in others when experience and history proves me otherwise.

Just ranting here, as I always do